Science fiction works have never stopped exploring the theme of digital life. In the recently hit “The Wandering Earth 2”, the philosophical question of “whether to escape from the end of the world or obtain eternal life with digital life” runs through the main line of the film plot.
As a new life form created by computers, digital life is an artificial system with natural life characteristics or behaviors. At present, digital life based on this standard has been produced, but applications such as chat robots, digital humans (including virtual assistants, virtual idols), AI painting, AI writing, etc. only have one or a few of the above functions, corresponding to The initial stage of digital life. Digital lifeforms with the same creativity, memory, learning and self-awareness as humans have not yet appeared.
Breaking away from the extreme situations in the movie and returning to reality, perhaps there is no need to choose between reality and virtual reality. It is the best choice to use digital life to assist the real life of human society. But before that, two questions need to be answered, namely, how to realize digital life and what can digital life do?
More than half a century of evolution
The research on digital life can be traced back to Alan Turing and von Neumann. The former proved that the embryonic development of organisms can be studied with computational methods, and the latter attempted to describe the logical form of biological self-reproduction with computational methods.
“L system” is widely used to simulate the real growth process of plants
Since the 1960s, a number of experts in the fields of computer and biology have carried out experiments related to digital life based on their own research, and proposed important theories such as “Magnetic Core War”, “L System”, and “Biomorphology” And ideas, laid an important experimental methodology for the artificial life research of later generations.
Later, with the rapid increase in computer speed and the popularization of PCs, there was a wave of research in the world to create new life forms with non-biological media.On the basis of predecessors, Langton proposed the idea of creating “siliconized life” in a computer virtual environment, and established artificial life as an independent discipline and research field.
Inspired by the “Magnetic Core War”, in 1990, the world’s first digital life model Tierra (meaning “earth” in Spanish) caused a sensation in the artificial life world. Thomas Ray, a rainforest expert at the University of Delaware, introduced the concept of life evolution into the computer field, using the resources provided by computers to provide a living environment for digital life.The digital life he designed uses numbers as the carrier, aiming to explore various phenomena and laws in the process of life evolution. On the one hand, digital life exists in the random access memory (RAM) environment in the form of computer programs; on the other hand, it uses CPU time to organize its behavior in memory cells. With the help of corresponding competition strategies, digital life competes for CPU running time and storage space.
In subsequent studies, the Avida system designed by Adami, an artificial life researcher at the California Institute of Technology, evolved digital biology, and the amoeba world established by Paglis of Bell Labs realized the transformation from “pre-biological” to “biological”. ” change. The improved amoeba II has taken a big step forward in spontaneously generating ancestral organisms, and can also generate open evolution.
Compared with the digital twin that stored human consciousness into the computer in the movie, the early digital life research was completely digital native from scratch, and limited by the historical conditions at that time, the research objects were mainly “biological” creatures. Organisms”, multicellular organisms, viruses and other biological types.
The charm of digital life
Digital life is artificial life, which is fundamentally different from carbon-based life. However, digital life also follows the law of genetic evolution, providing experimental means for the study of biological evolution and complex life systems, and the study of digital life also provides a new way for people to explore the essence of life.
This kind of scientific research can provide computer models and network support environments for human reproduction, genetic and evolutionary processes, and can also be applied to multi-dimensional fields such as medical health, environmental pollution, and population explosion. At present, the industrial ecology surrounding various dimensions of digital life is complicated, and some technologies have already explored specific landing scenarios.Among them, the application in the field of medical health is closest to the essence of digital life.
At present, the application direction of digital life in the field of medical health mainly includes health management, precision medicine, etc. In the future, it is also possible to realize digital life networking to find suitable matching types for various related operations, and even accelerate the development of drugs and vaccines and simplify the vaccination and medication process under the premise of mutual conversion between digital and biological signals.
Regardless of the medical application, digitizing carbon-based life is the most crucial step.At present, the mainstream method to achieve this process is gene sequencing, that is, using various molecular biology techniques to put biological samples into machines for various tests to determine the full sequence of genes; combined with the analysis of life behavior, environment The continuous measurement of organic life is quantified.
The next step is to interpret the life data, try to understand the health status behind each set of data, and its specific changes under different behavioral events, and find out the rules. In this step, AI will be introduced for data analysis, data mining, and data modeling involving state changes, and continuous training will be carried out on the silicon-based data model against the human body to realize the anthropomorphism of digital life.
The third step is the final application, which provides personalized human health management solutions through the built model, including disease prediction and prevention, precise targeted medication and treatment, etc.
“Digital-to-Biological Converter”
The above-mentioned applications still continue the one-way path of “life-digital”, and some people have already taken the first step in restoring the decoded data to biology.In 2017, the “Digital Bioconverter” (DBC) developed by American biologist Craig Venter and others can directly produce nucleic acids and proteins from DNA sequence information. Virus.
This technology is currently being commercialized, and a very important direction is to generate a variety of oligomers that do not require exogenous templates for assembly into full-length mRNAs, commonly known as mRNA printers, which can burden more patients around the world Affordable personalized point-of-care mRNA therapy.This will usher in a new era of low-cost, on-demand, clinical-grade RNA medicines.
How far is virtual immortality?
Compared with the movies “Super Body” and “The Wandering Earth 2”, human beings get rid of the shackles of the body and obtain a complete and eternal life in the computer system with the help of computing power, chatGPT, which has shocked us so much, is still in the early days of digital life level. On the basis of text simulation, digital life still has a long way to go, such as simulating voice, continuous learning, real-time interaction with people in a more concrete form, forming the emotional memory and decision-making ability of real people, and finally possessing independent consciousness.
Going out of the cinema and rethinking the possibility of the “Digital Life Project” being implemented in reality, although the difficulty is obvious, there are traces to follow.
First of all, human consciousness is essentially the product of neuroelectrochemical signals in the brain, and the human connectome project dedicated to deciphering the neural pathways of the brain has been in progress. Just recently, a brain-computer interface company in the United States has successfully decoded neural signals in animals, and related human tests are expected to be approved by the FDA in the next few months. Once the decoding of human consciousness is completed, it will no longer be a problem to extract the complete biological information of human beings, even memory and consciousness.The famous American futurist Ray Kurzweil once predicted that in the 1930s, it will be possible to upload information from the human brain.
Secondly, the development of quantum computers that can provide ultra-high-speed computing power has made progress, and is currently moving from realizing the superiority of quantum computing to dedicated quantum simulators. Of course, it will take at least 10 to 15 years to help humans quickly complete difficult infrastructure construction in the movie.It may take much longer to reach a level that stably supports the continuous operation of a complete and complex human autonomous consciousness.
From this point of view, in the lifetime, digital life with human-generated sources is expected to become a reality. However, considering its high technical cost, social groups replaced by highly developed AI will also find it difficult to afford the commercial price of virtual immortality.
